Andrea Dooley

Andrea Dooley holds a PhD in Cultural Studies with a Designated Emphasis in African and African American Studies from the University of California Davis. Her work is concerned with place and the role of the public museum and memorial in post-conflict societies. Focusing on genocide museums and memorials in Rwanda, her work considers genocide museum and memorial spaces that are offered up as strategies to foster a unified Rwandaness, in an attempt to create cohesive community relations and shape post-conflict national identity. Her research interrogates how questions of memory, the negotiation of difference in aftermath of conflict, national belonging and identity are mobilized in public spaces where genocide museums and memorials are at the center of the complex relations of history, memory, mourning and identity. However, her work finds that these same strategies are undone in a real world of social, communal and political relations, creating fluidity, tension and generative instability in the real spaces those relations occupy. 

Her most recent essay, published in the Journal of Human Rights, is We are All Rwandans: Repatriation, National Identity and the Plight of Rwanda’s Children. She was the recipient of the Davis Humanities Institute’s President’s Multi-Year Doctoral Fellowship (2008-2012) and the UC Davis African Studies Research Fellowship (2013).  Andrea is currently Visiting Faculty at the San Francisco Art Institute in the Department of Interdisciplinary Studies/Critical Studies teaching undergraduate and graduate courses in critical theory, human rights and material culture, museum studies, and memory studies.

PhD., (2014) Cultural Studies, University California, Davis 

M. A., (2006) Visual Criticism, California College of the Arts, (Formerly CCAC)

B. A., (2003) Social Science, Interdisciplinary Studies, San Francisco State University

Andrea Dooley andrea_dooley@yahoo.com